This Saturday Iron Reign attended the scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This scrimmage was for many rookies, the first exposure to a competition environment and the basic structures of team communication. Both the rookies and the returning team members had an...
Today, Iron Reign competed in the DISD scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This was the first scrimmage of the year, so experienced teams and rookie teams alike struggled to get a working robot on the field. We go to this scrimmage every year, and it helps us gage just how much needs to be done...
We were helping our school's FRC team clean out their parts closet, which hadn't been cleaned in 10-ish years. Under the layers and layers of FRC junk, we found an Apple II-operated Patterson/Paxton CNC Milling Set. These were meant to run off of a long-since-gone Apple II in a classroom setting. But, it had long been auctioned off, leaving the set useless. But,...
The generic engineering journal rubric given to teams by FIRST heavily recomends having a season-summary intro page at the front of the journal. As well, every winning example journal includes the summary. So, we figured out that it might be a good idea to actually make one.
Iron Reign has been a FIRST team, in one form or another, for eight years....
In November, we went to a Oklahoman qualifier in Mustang. The reason for this was purely strategic - by competing in multiple regions, we have more chances of advancing, as well as having more in-tournament experience overall. There, we got 2nd-place Inspire and advanced to the Oklahoma Regionals. Then, when we came back to Dallas,...
It was a cold and dark morning. The howling winds of a cold front rushed through the grass. Under this cover of darkness, one car after another pulled up to a house, dimly lit. A car door would open for a second, letting a child out into the cold night. Under these auspicous conditions,...
After making significant development on our robot, we decided to model it. So far, we have developed the chassis of the robot seen below
To develop this, many types of contraints were used.
The entire model is dependent on this tetrix bar. The bar was constrainted using the Default feature since it was the base of the model. To this, the lift...
We have finally completed assembly modeling Kraken, Iron Reign's Relic Recovery robot. Named after the sea creature due to the robot's OCTOPUCKERS, Kraken stands as a fierce competitor in FTC.
To the chassis, we added the glyph system mounting. We first designed a linear slide replica and constrained that to a small TETRIX U connector piece which attached to the REV rail base. On the other side...
Since we're in the last weeks of December, our schools are legally obligated to let us out. And, while colleges aren't legally mandated to let their students out, they tend to do so, as not doing that would rather enrage their students and families. So, due to this fortuitous coincidence, us simple FTC students were able...
This past weekend, Iron Reign hosted a 28-team qualifier at Townview Magnet Center. Many of us attend the School of Science and Engineering inside Townview, so it was familiar territory and made the whole experience a little easier. We were lucky enough to host a Scrimmage as practice for our actual qualifier. Weeks of preparation and anticipation paid...
Even though we did very well in the Oklahoma qualifier, we still encountered several problems, that if not addressed, could lower our chances of getting to Super-Regionals. So, we had a team discussion on what to do differently in the next tournament, and what to keep constant.
Once done, our postmortem post will be here.
On Nov. 17, we went to the Oklahoma Mustang HS qualifier. Our strategy for this tournament was to attempt to qualify in multiple regions so that we have more chances to get to the South Super Regionals. For...
Since Iron Reign is hosted in our coaches' house, we only have so much space. Even though we've basically taken over their house, a consequence of that is that we don't really have a place to put the field...until now.
In prior posts, we've talked about building a pool deck to store our field, and its finally become a...
So, we were absolute failures. There's no way to get around that. We got 14th place out of 14, and our presentation flopped. But, its not the end of the world, even if it may feel like it. We have another qualifier in Oklahome in one week, and we need to analyze what we did wrong...
Any well-versed team understands that, depending on the competition for the year, a robot will either be modified to compete or be built from the ground up. In any case, however, a robot often starts at its chassis, and teams have multiple companies that provide solutions to the common robot chassis’ needs and specifications. To name a few: AndyMark® has its standard kits that include all the...
Today we started the task of building the field, which we received for free, thanks to DISD and their generous donation. The first task Charlotte, Austin, Karina worked on was assembling the balancing stones and the cryptoboxes. While building the field we ran into a few difficulties. First, when we were making the balancing stone, we accidentally had on the cover plate on...
Iron Reign has been a team for 8+ years now through multiple competitions. We started as a wee middle school FLL team at W.B. Travis, and we've grown exponentially since then. We've competed in MoonBots and FTC, represented our school at SuperRegionals, presented at the National Science Teachers' Association covention, and built our own RV in order to serve underpriveledged communities accross the Dallas Metroplex. But, after the current original team members...
Dear Iron Reign,
8 years ago, when I walked into Mr. Schulte’s room after school, I didn’t realize my life was about to change dramatically. I’d heard there was a robotics club which was attempting to be started. I’d had sparse experience with the subject, through extraneous events like the annual Engineering Saturday at UTA, so I decided to give it a shot. When I walked through that door on the second floor, I didn’t realize I would find my second family and grow...
layout: Do not touch. title: Title of your article (you can't use hyphens or colons.) tags: Enter as comma seperated list, case insensitive. Try to use one award and one normal tag
Hooray for graduation! Sort of. As we seniors write our farewell blog posts before we head to college, we have a lot of years to think about. In my case, I only have my 4 years of high school to pull from, but that's more than enough to express my gratitude for being on this team. I've learned so much in so many different areas, and not just scientific ones. I've learned...
Well... this is somewhat of a bittersweet moment for me. All of us seniors are leaving for college in hopes of spreading our horizons and making something of ourselves, but we're leaving this team that has become almost a second family. It's been a good few years since I first joined this team and I never thought that I would even make it to this point. I've learned so much in...
Many members were out of town this break but we still managed to make a good deal of progress. What we forgot to do was post about it. Github kept track of code edits and we have other records of the practices, so we have a list of 11 articles to be written by this Sunday at the latest. Tomorrow's practice (Saturday March...
Scouting:
Good
Bad
Notes: While we did well with scouting, it could have gone off much better. We made some mistakes...
On Febuary 25, we drove our RV to W.E. Pete Ford Middle School, in Allen, TX. The tournament was split into two divisions, and for many of our members, this was our first time encountering that layout. We didn't have any of our team members going to Dean's List interviews this time. We still didn't have an...
In our competitions we really can't rely on our robot performing as well as it does in practice and our sparring matches with Imperial. If we're going to increase our chances of advancing from Regionals to Super-Regionals 90% of the time it's going to be from judging. We've always had rocky presentations in my opinion, but this year we're getting our energy...
This year, to give our team a better chance of going to super-regionals for the first time, we decided to enter the Arkansas regional. We were actually pretty far ahead compared to our last seasons. We had a finished robot, a working autonomous, and good drivers.
To Arkansas...
I remember, vaguely, that someone on our team wanted to add a post counter for all the posts people appear in. And, today, I did it out of sheer boredom. And, here it is.
{% assign eh = 1 %} {% assign dc = 1 %} {% assign ed = 1 %} {% assign or = 1 %} {% assign js = 1 %} {% assign cr = 1 %} {%...
A bit of background: UIL is a Texas-specific organization that hosts competitions in both academic and athletic pursuits. This year, they ran a pilot program for Robotics, using the FTC rules and field from Res-Q. About 72 teams competed in the FTC-based competition, which then was split into two catagories. Unlike regular FIRST tournaments, the awards not earned by competition are given through nomination by other teams.
So as I've made changes to the blog I've realized that not everyone understands the little rules or guidelines I've made, but never quite explained. Following is a mock post, the content is a guide on what to put in each section.
Our main weakness in previous years had been our presentation. This year, we plan to change that. When our team was solely FLL, we practiced our presentations beforehand, so, we're applying that to this year. We've done 2-3 presentations so far and it seems it really helps us. As well, we're making a powerpoint presentation to assist us, giving us information we might forget and providing a visual...
In a rough order, here are the things I've worked on in the blog over the past month or so:
We rarely prepare enough for awards, usually hoping the practice before that we've done enough to be in the running. Last year we won the PTC Creo award at one competition, but that was a one time deal. This year we can prepare our journal in such a way to make it easier for judges to find what they're looking for when deciding. 
Out of the 9 awards, 7 are given at every tournament....
We've been tagging each blog post as we write them according to topics we think they fall into, but there's been no standard for what to choose from. For example, what I tag as "Mechanical" Omar tags as "Build." When we get some scripting done on the blog to separate according to topic we will need consistency between everybody.
So far these are the tags chosen to represent main topics and types...
Today, we reviewed opmodes in the FTC API and how to register new opmodes. We also learned about the differences between regular, linear and synchronous (from SwerveRobotics) opmodes.
Our Blog == our Journal. What we also did today was quickly review how to create blog entries so we can do that more frequently this year. We also tried to catch up on our lengthy backlog of journal articles. We were very busy...
